“Do what you can.”
The H1 clawed its way to the top of the hill, crested it, and began the long plunge. “CHRIST!” LaMastra yelped and stood on the brakes and the Hummer smoked to a stop. A hundred yards ahead three cars were jammed across the narrow road, blocking it entirely. Hungry white faces leered at them through the windows, and a handful of vampires stood on the road. As the H1 rocked on its springs from the sudden stop, the creatures began running toward them.
LaMastra stared at the road. On either side of the obstruction was a narrow verge and then a sheer drop into a drainage ditch. “I’ll take suggestions,” he said hastily.
Crow racked the slide on his Berretta. “Ramming speed.”
LaMastra threw him a tight smile. “Okay, kids, buckle up for safety.”
The running vampires had almost reached the car when the H1 lunged forward. Crow leaned out his window with his pistol and emptied the clip into the pack. Three went down with holes in chests and stomachs, and two more were smashed into the shadows by the grille and weight of the H1, but these two got up and began chasing the car as it rolled toward the roadblock. Behind the H1, the five pursuit cars crested the hill and swooped down like predatory birds. The lead car did not even try to veer around one of the running vampires and the creature was smashed down and then crushed by each succeeding vehicle.
LaMastra bellowed like a bear as the muscular H1 smashed into the roadblock at the point where two smaller cars, a Fiat and a Saab, sat nose to nose. With all the weight and momentum behind it, the Hummer punched through, swatting the smaller cars aside. Crow leaned out the window with his shotgun and fired round after round of the metal-vaporizing Shok-Lok rounds into the lead pursuit car, hitting the grille and turning the engine instantly into junk. The car lost control and slewed sideways into one of the barricade cars, catching a vampire between the two machines and crushing him from crotch to knees. The other pursuit cars tried to jam on brakes, tried to swerve, but they were going too fast, and they hit, one after another in a collapsing accordion of torn metal and ruptured gas tanks.
Behind the H1 the world erupted into towering flame as a fiery fist of smoke and burning gasoline punched upward into the sky and shock waves chased down the hills.
“Goddamn!” yelled LaMastra in triumph. Crow was nodding as he reloaded the Remington. Val and Mike were twisted around backward, watching the tower of flame.
2
Jonatha led the way, the shotgun’s unfamiliar weight heavy in her sweating hands. Behind her was a straggling line of patients, staff, and visitors she’d gathered from the top four floors. Many of the visitors were dazed and followed her with glazed eyes and vapid smiles. One tried to give her some candy corn, but Jonatha had long since lost her appetite. A staff nurse—whom Jonatha had found hiding in a utility closet—had tried to take charge of the exodus, but after a good look at Jonatha, who was covered in blood, over six feet tall, and carrying a shotgun, the nurse just shut up and helped round up the survivors.
For as busy a hospital as Pinelands Hospital, there were pitifully few ambulatory survivors, and of those fewer still would be any good in a fight. Even so, it didn’t take a lot of strength to pull a trigger, so Jonatha handed out handguns to the weakest and the long guns to the strongest.
The elevators were out, but the nurse told her that there was a zigzag ramp in the back of the east wing, which had long sloping ramps for use during fires or other emergencies when the elevators were out. Jonatha led her charges that way, gathering other survivors along the way. Newton was on the front gurney, crowded in with an old lady who had just had her knee replaced; Dr. Weinstock’s heavy pistol was clutched in his hands. At the end of the line was a farmer who had come to the hospital to visit a friend and who now carried Eddie Oswald’s service Glock, the spare magazines stuffed in the pockets of his bib overalls.
Every floor of the hospital was a shambles, but there did not seem to be anything moving, alive or dead, except the people who joined her parade.
The nurse leaned close to Jonatha, “We can get to the old triage unit—it’s where they do seminars on ER techniques. It’s not used for patients except if we get overflow. It’s on the next floor down and it will have been closed tonight.”
“Sounds good,” Jonatha said, “let’s get everyone in there and barricade the door.”
But the triage room was already occupied when they got there. A man sat on the edge of one of the tables, a can of Coke in his hands, a pistol lying next to him.
Jonatha gasped and brought the shotgun up to cover him. She could see that he was not a vampire. One side of his face was burned and bubbled, the skin hanging in melted folds; one eye was as white as a boiled egg. He waggled the soda can at her.
“Hey,” he said with a smile that made his disfigured face look positively hideous. “Come on in.”
Jonatha waved the others back and entered the room very cautiously. Just because the man was not one of them did not immediately allay her fears. Even under the burned skin he looked mean and there was a twinkle to his one good eye that made Jonatha feel stripped naked. His gaze crawled up and down her body, lingering appreciatively on her chest, and then finally staring boldly into her eyes. “Yeah, you can definitely come in.”
“Who are you?” she asked nervously, peering around the room to make sure there was no one else lurking in there.
He watched her examination and chuckled. “Ain’t no one else, darlin’. Just me. Just the Incredible Melting Man.” He giggled like he was stoned. “Come on in.”
“I…have a bunch of people with me. We all need to come in.”
“Sure, sure, bring ’em in.” He waved the bottle. “I was wondering when you’d get down this way. I was in the hall a few times and heard you talking.”
She narrowed her eyes. “You weren’t in the hall. I didn’t see you.”
“No,” he said with a sly smile, “but I saw you.”
Jonatha frowned. “And you sure you’re all alone?”
“Honest to God, sweetie,” Vic Wingate said, “aside from you I’m the only living soul in this room.”
3
They came to him, flooding in from the town, from the farms, from the lonely houses that now stood empty of life along the fringes of the black highway. Those that did not have cars came running, their tireless limbs carrying them across the miles, their powerful muscles helping them leap and dive and climb and drop. They came down the long hill, and they came over the tops of the mountain; they came through secret ways in the forest, drawn to the forbidden swamp deep in the heart of Dark Hollow, compelled by the force of Ubel Griswold’s dark desire.
The farmers came first, their overalls and jeans and flannel shirts splashed with their own blood and the blood of neighbors and family. Sometimes they came in whole family groups, each white face eager to be in the presence of their new father. They lumbered into the clearing and fell prostrate before the bubbling swamp, overwhelmed with Griswold’s nearness, lost in the aura of his power. Then came the teenagers from the Haunted Hayride. Scores of them with slashed throats and black eyes full of hunger. They laughed and smiled, delighting in their freedom, in their strength, intoxicated by the blood that thundered through their veins. The town folk—residents and tourists—came later, most of them in Halloween costumes, and they cavorted like jesters in the court of the king.
They gathered and danced and leapt and sang out in their joy, feeding off the energies released by the Ritual even as Griswold fed off each of them, off each of their kills. It was a sharing of energy, an orgy of parasites.
Two figures stood at the edge of the clearing, and between them slumped a third. The two watchers were as deeply moved as all the others, but they were not allowed to join in. It was their special task to wait, to watch, and to be ready with the sacrifice that sagged in a dead faint in their cold hands.
Ruger stroked the hand he held, delighting in its warmth, knowing that it was the quickly flowing blood that kept it warm even in this cold place. He was glutted, having killed and fed so many times tonight that he had lost count, satiating himself so fully that he had many times had to vomit up the mingled human wine in order to be able to keep on feeding; yet still he hungered for this unconscious woman’s blood. Not that he desired her in the way he had desired his grinning consort, who stood holding this woman’s other hand. No, he desired her because she was the chosen sacrifice, because she was taboo. She was reserved strictly for the Man, and that made Ruger hunger for her with a fierce passion. He knew that Lois felt it, too, and as he turned to her she hissed at him, smiling as her tongue lolled between her fangs. Her pale body was ripe and white, as hard as polished stone. They had used each other over and over again since last night, since the moment when Ruger had forced innocent blood into her mouth and released her into a world of dark delight and bloodred pleasure. That act had driven the soul out of her, had freed her. Now she was his and he was hers; their hungers were equal and incredibly intense.
Ruger had known from the very moment he’d first tasted her vampire blood that she would be like him, a killer who delighted in the joy of the kill, who craved the fear, the hurt, the desperation that could be provoked in the struggling victim. In that way they were more like Griswold than like the rest of the revelers gathered here. A darker power burned in their hearts, and they delighted in it.
Together they watched the writhing bodies. Some of them had stripped and were abusing each other in every possible way, and in some ways only possible for creatures of their kind, creatures with their strength and endurance. There were screams of pain and ecstasy, and Ruger felt himself getting hard as the children of the Man went insane with passion, became frantic with want, as they glutted themselves on blood and violence. All in his name. Ruger thought it was all a blast. As much as he wanted to defile this woman, he also wanted to discard her and throw himself into the press, to rend and tear and take. He wanted to watch Lois as she rutted and bit and tore and screamed. She was so vicious and cold and passionate that it made Ruger dizzy just to think about her at the moment of a kill.